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Firewalls

I’ve been following the firewall debate from a layman’s spectator perspective via other physics blogs. I haven’t gotten around to reading some of the meaty details in the literature, but such papers are on the aforementioned list! I hope to read this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123. There is at least one other paper by Susskind on the topic that I hope to read: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.4505.

A part of this whole issue is the black-hole information paradox, which is also something that I understand only superficially. What I do know comes from Susskind’s popular science book “The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics”, which I read late last year. It’s a very gentle introduction to the concepts of entropy and information and does a good job of explaining the important concepts related to the black-hole information paradox and the ‘resolution’ proposed by complementarity. My (limited) understanding is that the firewall idea challenges some of the accepted wisdom on complementarity and general relativity’s equivalence principle. Maybe I can be less vague after carefully reading some of the literature on this stuff…